Many restaurants' success depends on how quickly customers can be served with food items that a customer orders and on the quality of the food when it is served. If the rate at which a restaurant prepares food products equals the rate at which those same food products are ordered and sold, a restaurant can theoretically have freshly-prepared foods ready to serve for customers as they arrive. It is not always possible to match food production with customer ordering rates however. Since many restaurant customers expect to receive their ordered food items quickly, many restaurants prepare food items ahead of actual orders and keep them ready for sale.
Prior art food holding ovens or cabinets that keep food warm until it is served are well known. Such cabinets have one or more horizontal compartments in which a packaged food item or food holding tray is kept at an elevated temperature within a relatively narrow temperature range. The compartments of many prior art food holding cabinets are defined by flat, metal shelves. The shelves are typically heated by an electrically-resistive wire attached to the bottom or underside of the metal shelf.
Those of ordinary skill in the restaurant industry know that different types of foods are often best kept at different holding temperatures. A problem with prior art food holding cabinets that have food holding compartments defined by metal shelves is that the metal shelves eventually reach a single, uniform temperature. Keeping different foods at different holding temperatures thus requires using different compartments that are held at different temperatures or in different cabinets. A food holding cabinet that has one or more compartments in which food products can be kept at different holding temperatures in the same compartment(s) would be an improvement over the prior art.